Three-dimensional unsaturated flow in heterogeneous systems and implications on groundwater contamination: A stochastic approach

A stochastic approach for modeling transient unsaturated flow in large-scale spatially variable soils is developed in order to overcome the problem of limited information about the local details of spatial soil variability. It is assumed that local soil properties are realizations of three-dimensional stationary random fields, and a large-scale model representation is derived by averaging the local governing flow equation over the ensemble of realizations of the underlying soil property random fields. The three-dimensionality of the local flow equations and the nonlinear dependence of the local flow output on the local soil properties are considered. The resulting mean representation (structure) is in the form of a partial differential equation in which averaged or effective model parameters occur. These effective model parameters are evalutated using a quasi-linearized fluctuation equation and a spectral representation of stationary processes. The large-scale model structure considers the large-scale effects of soil variability and have relatively few parameters which should be identifiable from a realistic data set. The general stochastic theory is then applied to the case of flow in stratified soil formations, which is of practical importance in applications such as waste disposal control. An important finding of this study is that spatial variability of the hydraulic soil properties produces significant large-scale effects, such as large-scale hysteresis and anisotropy of the effective parameters. These large-scale effects should be considered in field applications such as for predicting the movement of liquid wastes in the unsaturated zone.